Expendable
by Harkpad
Summary: Jack finds Ianto sifting through files in his office. Ianto is looking to see how far back he can trace Jack. "You could've just asked," Jack declared. "Didn't seem polite," Ianto answered.A second "chapter" has been added as Ianto realizes something.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: This went a direction I did not expect. This comes from a practice of mine to simply begin with a line of dialogue and let it unfold on the page, and it went somewhere I never saw coming. I can't decide if it works. Concrit would be most welcome.**

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Jack walked into his office with his nose in the file he had gone to the Archives for, and he almost tripped over Ianto, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Jack's desk with a stack of files strewn around his feet and a cup of coffee next to his knee. Jack stopped suddenly enough that he spilled some of the coffee that was in the cup in his own hand. Ianto looked up at him with an eyebrow raised.

"You weren't there when I left," Jack declared defensively.

Ianto nodded, "Right. But you left twenty minutes ago, so the floor seemed fair game."

Jack maneuvered himself around Ianto and eased himself into his desk chair, taking a sip of his coffee. After a moment, he asked, "What're you doing, Ianto?"

"Looking you up," Ianto replied, without looking up from his file.

Jack waited for an explanation, but none seemed forthcoming. He took another sip of his coffee. "Why are you looking me up in my own files?" he asked blithely.

"Wanted to see how far back you went," Ianto replied, still not looking up.

Jack thought for a moment. "You could just ask."

"Didn't seem polite," Ianto countered, his eyes still stuck on whatever file he had pulled up.

"How old is that one?" Jack asked, thinking a change of course might yield a more complete answer from the very young man sitting on his floor.

"1935."

"Am I actually in the file?" Jack queried, as his own recollection was that he had cleaned out traces of himself in these files pretty well.

"Not directly, but yes," Ianto replied, looking up with a gleam in his eye. "You took your name out, but the Director is complaining about reckless field work followed by inappropriate offers of clean-up help, which sounds suspiciously like you."

Jack chuckled, "You got me there."

"The Director accused you in another file of helping an alien instead of killing it."

"I tried as much as I could." Jack suddenly remembered a strange case with an alien diplomat who had landed on the wrong planet. That had been fun until the diplomat figured out that Jack was using his confusion for his own . . . entertainment. They resolved their issues in Jack's favorite ways, but then Jack had to get the alien off-planet before Torchwood killed it, which had landed Jack in some hot water. It was one time out of many. He looked back up at Ianto and asked, "Did you find anything earlier?"

Ianto shuffled through his papers and pulled up a file. "I think this one might be you." He handed the file to Jack and shrugged. Jack flipped the file open, read for a minute, and handed it back to Ianto with a sigh. 1870. "Yeah, That's me." He paused and added, "You really could just ask, you know."

Ianto shrugged and looked up from the files, "This is like a puzzle. Besides, I wasn't sure if you'd really want to talk about that far back."

Jack sighed, knowing Ianto was probably right. "Were you bored?" He deflected, or so he thought.

Ianto's mouth quirked up slightly, "A little," he answered, and he started picking the files up off of the floor and standing up, minding his coffee mug. "I don't think they liked you much back then," he commented as he gathered the papers and deliberately began putting them back in the cabinet.

Jack didn't answer, just sipped his coffee again. He didn't quite know how to answer right away. He watched Ianto file the folders of his life away quietly and then stated, "That was still early. Alice and Emily never really got the hang of me. I was _really_ out of my time back then."

Ianto stopped for a moment, not looking at Jack, and then started filing again. "I found one where they killed you, just to see what you could take. They didn't call you Jack, though. Just 'the subject.' They seemed fascinated."

"That's one word for what they were," Jack said, a little bit harshly because, after all, they were bastards at the very least.

Ianto finally turned back to Jack and made his way slowly to the edge of the desk. Jack wondered why he was moving so slowly. The air was suddenly heavy, heavy with history, heavy with fear, heavy with guilt.

"They killed you over and over," Ianto said quietly, looking into Jack's eyes now.

Jack averted his gaze and looked down into his cup. "Yes." Over and over and over, really. The air at Torchwood had been heavy with blood back then. He looked back up at Ianto and shrugged. "It only lasted a while." He paused and took another drink of his coffee and added, "I was helpful to them."

After a moment's quiet hesitation, Ianto leaned down and picked Jack's cup up. "Get you a refill?"

Jack nodded and Ianto retreated from the office.

Later, when there were back at Ianto's flat and it was the middle of the night, and Jack was sated and Ianto was dozing with his head on Jack's chest, Jack found himself murmuring, "They didn't like me much back then."

Ianto stirred."When _did_ they get the hang of you?" he mumbled, voice heavy with sleep.

Jack lay quietly in the dark of Ianto's bedroom, running his fingers absently through Ianto's hair, feeling the weight of his lover, and he gazed over at the wan light of the streetlight pushing its way through the curtains and into the bedroom and thought for a while. Ianto dozed off again, and Jack thought of 'it doesn't matter if you die, Harkness, you always come back anyway' and 'go get a shower Harkness, you have blood in your hair,' and 'Harkness, did you die tonight?' and 'How the hell did you recover from that? You're a monster,' and 'I'm leaving and taking her with me and you'd better stay away from us,' and 'Jack you're in charge now, I'm leaving this to you,' and he ignored Ianto's question and tried to sleep but he couldn't.

The next morning, after breakfast and showers and a quiet drive back to the Hub, Jack sat at his desk and waited for Ianto to bring him his coffee. Jack felt tired, dragged down, like his braces were too tight and his shirt was heavy, and he looked down at the task list he's just made for himself for the day and it looks far too long for one person to handle. He looked up as Ianto came into his office and set the cup on his desk near his elbow and then stepped back.

"Was there a Director you ever liked, Jack?" he asked, as if picking up their conversation from yesterday where it left off and making no apologies for it.

Jack hesitated, running through names and faces and anger and laughter and fear and longing in his mind before answering, "No. Not really."

Ianto looked surprised. "I thought you might have liked Alex, from what I've read. Seems like he treated you better, anyway."

Jack was quiet for a moment and remembered silence and blood and fear and a timepiece and a gun and a spatter and he answered, "No, he killed me, too." And Ianto nodded with understanding in his grey-blue eyes and retreated from the office, leaving Jack to his tasks.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: This is for Quiet Time and inspired by 51****st**** Century Fox over at livejournal. I accidentally forgot to hit 'complete' the last time and Quiet Time asked for a follow-up, and then 51****st**** CenturyFox and I chatted a bit about why Jack hadn't gotten offered Director earlier. Thanks to both of them. I hope you all like it. **

"No, he killed me, too," Jack had said. He had said it definitively and Ianto could feel the answer as if Jack had pressed it into his chest, pushing the truth into Ianto despite the fact that Ianto knew it was Alex who had died, not Jack. How many times had Jack been killed simply by a word?

Ianto knew what it was like to be staked by a phrase. Jack had done it to him, after all. "That's not your girlfriend," he had said. "She died a long time ago," he had followed. Those words had murdered Ianto that night. Later, at the Brecon Beacons, the monster posing as a man had murdered him, too, simply with a threat and a meat cleaver in his hand. If he thought about it, Yvonne Hartman had killed him, too, simply by voicing her curiosity and never reining it in. No, whoever had made up the childhood mantra about sticks was stupidly naive, and Ianto figured Jack had suffered the arrows of others' words about as often as he'd suffered a mortal wound.

As Ianto stood in front of the medical filing cabinet the next day, trying to bring some order to Owen's chaos as a payback for losing at cards a few days ago, he wondered how Jack survived the lethal words of over a hundred and fifty years. It was such a long time to have to put up with humanity. Sometimes Ianto wanted to wash his hands of everyone himself, and he'd only been putting up with people for twenty-three years. He sighed to himself and continued filing for a while until he realized something without trying. He quietly closed the cabinet he was working on, climbed back to the main floor of the hub and paused long enough to fix a couple of cups of fresh coffee before making his way back to Jack's office.

He stood in the doorway and watched quietly for a moment as Jack worked on typing up a report, his face scrunched in rapt concentration. He loved watching Jack work on reports for some reason. They brought a focus to Jack that was usually fleeting; Ianto could catch Jack focusing in the field, on a target, but to see him sustain that focus in such a contained environment was rare, and he liked it. So he stood and watched for a few minutes until Jack finally looked up at him with a smile.

"Are you going to drink both of those while you watch or is one of them for me?" he asked, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms to relieve the tension of typing.

Ianto stepped in with a smile of his own and set one of the mugs down on the desk. "Want some company for a bit?" he asked as he made himself comfortable in the chair in front of the desk. Jack nodded and pulled his coffee to his lips, inhaling the sweet aroma before taking a sip.

"I hate writing reports."

"I love watching you write them, though," Ianto said with a grin. "Sexy."

"You're warped, Jones-Ianto-Jones," Jack retorted. "What've you been up to?"

"Trying to sort Owen's filing cabinet."

"How's that working out for you?" Jack asked.

"Rather poorly. Owen may be the one person who can trash a filing system worse than you can," Ianto stated.

"_And_ he's not as sexy as me," Jack replied, "So I win."

"Well," Ianto taunted, "He does have that nifty lab coat with the buttons. It smacks of cute."

"Cute is not sexy. Lab coats are cute. Great coats are sexy. I still win." Jack took a long drink of his coffee.

Ianto laughed, "Yeah, you win hands down. But you're both rubbish at filing."

They sat in comfortable silence for a minute before Jack asked, "What did you want to ask me?"

Ianto smiled at Jack's perception and replied, "Well, aside from 'how hard is it to put things beginning with J before things beginning with S', I wondered about something in those files I went through yesterday."

Jack nodded, but didn't respond.

Ianto took a deep breath. Jack had told him he could just ask about his past, although he was reticent nonetheless. "Judging from the reports, Alex Hopkins left you in charge of Torchwood Three rather by default, would you agree?"

Jack set his coffee cup down a little roughly on his desk. After a pause, he answered, "Yes."

Ianto plunged ahead, trying to trust his instincts. "That was at the turn of the century. Had no one offered you the Directorship before then? You'd been with the Institute over one hundred years."

Jack leaned back in his chair, leaving his coffee cup on his desk. He sat quietly and just stared at Ianto for long enough that Ianto started to get uncomfortable. "I'm sorry, Jack. I was just wondering," Ianto offered finally.

Jack shook his head, "Twice," he said quietly. Ianto leaned forward in his chair. Jack continued, "I got offered the job twice before. Once in the mid-sixties and once before they brought Alex in." His voice had dropped to almost a whisper.

"Why did you say no?" Ianto asked gently. He had read the report that had referenced the second job offer.

"The first time I said no because," Jack paused and looked away. "Well, I thought he'd be coming any time. I had it on some authority that a hundred years had to pass before the Doctor showed up, and that was when the hundred years was on the cusp. I didn't want to chance having to leave." At that Jack looked up and offered an apologetic smile. Ianto returned it in kind.

"And the second?" Ianto pushed. Jack didn't answer.

After a beat Jack asked, "Why are you asking this, Ianto?"

Ianto shrugged. It was a good question, and, while he thought he knew the answer before he started, now he wasn't so sure. It wouldn't hurt to offer, though. "I thought maybe you blamed yourself for Alex's crime. I was looking to confirm it." He saw something akin to anger flare in Jack's eyes for a moment.

"Why would I blame myself?" Jack queried coolly.

Ianto stood up and walked around to where Jack was sitting. Jack never took his eyes from Ianto's face, and Ianto knelt down next to Jack and rested his hands on Jack's knees. He looked up and replied, "Because if you'd accepted the job then the murder/suicide wouldn't have happened, and you know it."

Jack leaned forward so his face was close to Ianto's and asked, in a flat voice, "So did you confirm it? Do I feel guilty?"

"Of course you do, Jack. You wouldn't be you if you didn't. But you also explained yesterday why you should let that guilt go," Ianto responded just as coolly.

Jack leaned back, obviously startled by Ianto's answer. Ianto leaned forward into Jack's space again, this time pushing himself up, leaning on the arms of Jack's chair and brushing a kiss across his lips. "Every single Director killed you in some way. Taking their offer would have been suicide of the harshest kind, and who would ever do that willingly?"

Ianto watched as understanding dawned, and Jack leaned in and kissed Ianto long and slow.


End file.
